Most TV commercials are poorly targeted and show things you’d never buy. But not for long. Gracenote‘s new ad replacement system combines viewing habits with personal info to show you more relevant commercials. Gracenote will demo it at CES and start trials in 2013. The rev-share is still in talks, but higher CPMs could enlarge the $70 billion TV ad market and give Gracenote and partners a nice… → Read More
I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the… → Read More
Sony has agreed to acquire Gracenote for about $260M. Gracenote provides a range of music-related solutions including MusicID, which detects which song is currently being played by an application and loads track information for the user (such as artist and album names). MusicID leverages a database of over 6M CDs and 80M tracks. Its technology has been in development since 1995 (previously under… → Read More
We’ve all been there, searching for the words to Weezer’s My Name is Jonas because you can’t tell if Rivers Cuomo says “just like Grandma made when we couldn’t find something to eat” or “just like Grandma made when we couldn’t find sleep”. I see it all the time, it’s an epidemic. → Read More
It’s no secret that video sites like YouTube benefited from added traffic generated by hosting copyrighted content. But as these sites get acquired, integrate advertising, or just want to avoid a billion dollar lawsuit, they seek to shed their seedy past to stay kosher with the big media giants they hope will feed them content and advertising dollars. There are a lot of startups offering… → Read More
Music-playing cellphones were supposed to have “arrived” by now, but few companies have actually gotten them right so far. (That could be the wireless providers’ fault, though.) So Gracenote, the company that runs the CDDB database that iTunes checks every time you insert an audio CD, has come up with the Mobile Music 2.0 Platform. I know, the name could use some work. MM2 links… → Read More
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